"Interview with Things": A First-thing Perspective to Understand the Scooter's Everyday Socio-material Network in Taiwan

In the city, mobility is calling for new forms of smartness. To understand what is needed to design thoughtful forms of smart mobility, this paper combines thing ethnography and animistic research approaches to reveal the interwoven networks of personal and social relationships that develop around scooters in Taiwanese everyday life. To this end, a three-day study with six different types of scooterists was conducted in Taipei. Cameras and sensors were directly attached to the scooters themselves, to collect data from a 'thing' perspective. The data collected were then organized and offered to professional actors, who were invited to 'speak' on behalf of the scooters. Through the performance of the actors interpreting and empathizing with the scooter's everyday life, intents, expectations and relationships between scooters and scooterists were revealed and captured. We further discussed how the socio-material networks among scooters could provoke various creative and meaningful arrangements in everyday life.